Do I?: Love and marriage in Philip Dawkins' LE SWITCH

Le Switch by Philip Dawkins is a play about what it means to be committed, what it means to be married, and what it means to be queer. The play was workshopped at the Playwrights’ Center in the 2014 PlayLabs festival, and rehearsals are under way for its rolling world premiere production at the Jungle Theater. Three of the actors from the Playwrights’ Center workshop are reprising their roles, and the show is being directed by Jeremy B. Cohen, the Producing Artistic Director of the Playwrights’ Center.

The play takes place between 2011 and 2014, before Marriage Equality was passed federally and while states around the U.S. were very much in debate about the issue. As legislation was passed and couples ran to marriage, it articulated a great rift within the gay community about the institution of marriage. Dawkins’ play centers around the character of David, a gay librarian with these very questions about “the marriage boom” and its assumptions about gay culture going forward. As his friends and family question their beliefs on marriage, David meets his potential soulmate and has to face a deeper understanding of who he is in relation to love, marriage, and all the complexities in between.

Michael Wieser, who plays Zachary in the production and also played that role in the PlayLabs workshop, says, “I remember reading the play and being blown away by the complexity of the characters; now, those same characters exist in solid (though theatrical) reality. They are at the same time comic and tragic, complicated yet completely relatable. Philip Dawkins’ characters experience emotions on a very human level.”

Wieser adds, “On paper, my character Zachary is the comic relief, but playing him strictly as such would be a disservice to the production. We are only three days into rehearsals but already I am finding windows opening for him to show me his true humanity.”

The range of Dawkins’ deeply-human and relatable characters strikes a chord with many in the audience, and certainly with the artists collaborating on this production. Director Cohen says, “I feel like Philip keeps it really complex all the way through and doesn’t let his characters off the hook with easy solutions. In rehearsing the piece, I deeply value how he has written this story about how in adolescence, we have created these mythologies about ourselves, saying, ‘I’m this kind of person’ or ‘I would never do that’. He challenges his characters to come up against all those ideas about themselves.”

The PlayLabs workshop helped refine how each character grapples with these questions of identity and self-perception. As Dawkins explains, it brought other discoveries as well. “The workshop of Le Switch at the Playwrights’ Center was super helpful,” he says. “For one thing, it gave me and one of my future directors a chance to work together and develop a shared vocabulary and language. I was also able to explode the top of Act Two to open into a bigger reveal, a bigger moment that allowed a bomb to drop on this romance in a way that I think really lands the second act now. That was a huge take-away from that workshop experience.”

Le Switch is a funny, touching play that manages to feel both novel and universal. Dawkins calls it “a full-on romance,” and if the giddy faces of our PlayLabs audiences were any indication, a whole lot of people are about to fall madly in love with a new play at the Jungle.

 

Le Switch runs June 17-July 31 at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis.

Le Switch